Musical America

The 1997 critical acclaim for the Buena Vista Social Club caught American music critics off guard. Their self-titled CD, featuring a magnificent cast of elderly Cuban musicians working with guitarist-musicologist Ry Cooder, not only won a Grammy for best salsa recording but also opened the door to a veritable tidal wave of new recordings by Latin American artists, both old and new. The project even led to a critically acclaimed film by German director Wim Wenders.

For all its accolades, however, the Social Club was embraced chiefly by an older, more sophisticated audience in the pop world. What really has the record industry excited about the potential of Latin pop in this country is the one-two punch delivered by Bronx-born actress-singer Jennifer Lopez and Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin. Lopez’s single, “If You Had My Love,” has sold more than 1 million copies in nine weeks. And, more dramatic, Martin’s self-titled first English-language album, which includes the hit “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” sold 600,000 copies in its first week in the stores. The excitement over Martin landed him on the cover of Time magazine as the epitome of crossover artists--Latin singers and musicians who appeal to American audiences.

The music industry, the media and Latinos themselves are unaccustomed to seeing this level of popularity for Latin music. The optimists believe the United States is finally ready to accept Latin American culture, especially its music, as part of the American mainstream. More prudent, or perhaps just more cynical, analysts see commercialism fueling this fever.

John Storm Roberts in “The Latin Tinge” suggests that the appeal of Latin music from artists like Lopez and Martin--and to some extent Ibrahim Ferrer of the “Social Club”--is less a here-and-now phenomena than it is an ongoing love affair with the sensuality of these rhythms and melodies.

Roberts’ book, originally published in 1979 and reissued this year, provides a historical perspective that measures the impact of Latin music in this country more intelligently than the recent effusions of Time magazine. In less than 300 pages, this British salsa aficionado details how, over more than a century and a half, the music from Mexico, Cuba, Brazil and Argentina has driven the beat of music in this country more than one might suspect. “Latin music,” Roberts states, “has been the greatest outside influence on the popular music styles of the United States.”

Indeed, the flavor of Latin music in the United States, “the Latin tinge,” as Roberts calls it, is recognizable in some of the standards that emerged from Tin Pan Alley, popular tunes from Broadway and from Hollywood musicals, jazz, R&B;, country music and rock. But the impact Latin music has had in the United States has always been fleeting and not nearly as profitable as it is now.

Though Roberts’ book may well be the most comprehensive book published in English on the subject, it is not, by any means, the definitive book, which the author acknowledges in his prologue. There is just too much history and too little that has been written about it.

The book is at its best when Roberts guides the reader through each of the periodic waves of American interest in Latin music. His account of the tango craze, “the first massive nationwide Latin fad,” of the 1920s is both accurate and entertaining. The tango, writes Roberts, reached “the U.S. from Buenos Aires by way of Paris and Broadway” and became an instant hit. The Castle House School of Dancing, headed by Vernon and Irene Castle, opened branches all over the United States and could hardly meet the demand for tango lessons. From music halls to society balls and from restaurants and clubs specializing in thes dansants, America embraced the tango.

But the tango, for all its popularity, had a tough time of it. Some believed it was “bad for the spine.” In one case, a woman who broke a leg dancing demanded legislation that would ban a step called the dip. Elsewhere a society matron “asked the Castles to invent a desensualized tango, and they came up with the Innovation, a version performed without touching.” The tango soon hybridized into ragtime tangos. Even “St. Louis Blues,” “one of the most famous jazz numbers of all times, uses in its introduction a tango rhythm,” writes Roberts. But eventually, America’s romance with tango faded.

Unlike the tango craze, the influence of Mexican music in America cannot be limited to a specific era. As Roberts notes, its impact has been felt at least since the latter half of the 19th century. The relatively familiar rhythms and strong external influences of Mexican music, writes Roberts, “may be the reason why it has consistently melted into U.S. popular styles as an often unidentifiable seasoning, where Antillian and Brazilian music has tended to preserve at least some of its identity. But the presence of Mexican music in the southwestern United States also made it one of the ingredients of the western U.S. folk ethos from the start.”

Roberts also properly documents the impact of Brazilian music in this country, from Carmen Miranda, the woman who sang wearing six-inch heels and the fruited headdress to Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim jamming with Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz. But the musical styling that Roberts really cares for is the Caribbean music that filtered into the New York scene. From 1917, the year Puerto Ricans were granted United States citizenship, the migration from the island to New York, writes Roberts, laid “the foundation for the development, little more than ten years later, of an indigenous urban Latin style.”

The “rumba years” in the ‘30s created two different types of bands: those comprised of Latin musicians who played for Latinos in the barrio and those that mixed white and Latin musicians to play diluted versions of Latin music for an American audience. Xavier Cugat, perhaps the best representative musician in this latter category, tells Roberts: “Americans know nothing about Latin music. They neither understand nor feel it. So they have to be given music more for the eyes than the ears. Eighty percent visual, the rest aural.”

The golden age of Latin music, Roberts argues, came in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and the single most important event of that era is the formation of an orchestra known as Machito and his Afro-Cubans. Machito was a Cuban percussionist who migrated to New York in the 1940s and, with trumpeter and arranger Mario Bauza, created his group.

Roberts’ analysis of the involvement of jazz giants like Gillespie and Parker with Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo and bandleader Machito is accurate. But Gillespie and Parker are not, by any means, the only jazz players who showed an interest in Latin music. Nat King Cole and some of the famous big band leaders like Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Harry James and Tommy Dorsey also played, albeit, without leaving a distinguishable mark on the genre.

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But my biggest disappointment with “The Latin Tinge” is Roberts’ appraisal of Damaso Perez Prado and the famous controversy over the ownership of the rhythm called mambo. The origin of the word “mambo” remains unclear. Some musicologists say it is a word in the Congolese language, but whatever its origin, back in 1939, bandleader Antonio Arcano used it to describe a rhythm in which the structure of the traditional danzon is changed by adding a tumbadora or drum to its third part, creating a rhythmically syncopated pattern. Some called this addition sabrosura or diablo or mambo. A few years later, Perez Prado took from Arcano the syncopated Cuban percussion pattern of the danzon and combined it with some orchestral ideas he heard from U.S. musicians like Stan Kenton. He called it mambo, and soon the whole world was moving to this this new and astonishingly fast-paced rhythm. Many subsequent musicians declared themselves the creators of the mambo. In recent times, actor Andy Garcia added to the confusion by declaring Israel Lopez “Cachao” the real mambo king. The truth is that Perez Prado is the one and only mambo king.

Roberts is wrong when he writes that “the mambo reached its musical peak in New York.” The mambo reached its peak in 1949 when Perez Prado left Cuba to form a spectacular orchestra in Mexico. To call Perez Prado “one of [mambo’s] greatest popularizers” is far too narrow. And to suggest that the bands of Machito, Jose Curbelo, Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez had “greater sophistication” than Perez Prado’s is nonsense.

Writing about Perez Prado’s arrangements, Cuban musicologist Helio Orovio in his “Dictionary of Cuban Music” suggests, “one should notice the way Cuban percussion lay the foundation to a counterpoint of saxes that play along the trumpets which rise to alarming tonalities creating a playful mix of harmony, melody and rhythm. Underneath all, the trombones rubricate the musical phrases, and from somewhere way back in the orchestra, the voice of the Mambo King is heard with its characteristic growl.”

But Roberts is not alone in denying Perez Prado his due. Radames Giro, another Cuban musicologist, has noted that at that time, “the success of Perez Prado and his orchestra proved too difficult to handle for those who wanted to profit from the commercialization of Cuban music in the United States.” According to a personal account, collected by Giro, “as Perez Prado was beginning to succeed, the representative of the Latin division of the Southern Music Co. & Peer International announced his company had declared a boycott against Perez Prado. No Cuban composer working for his company could use Perez Prado as arranger.” Cristobal Diaz Ayala, another renowned Cuban musicologist, also credits Perez Prado with the creation of the mambo, as we know it.

But beyond the opinions of the experts, simply listening to the recordings made by both Machito and Perez Prado of “Que Rico el Mambo,” a Perez Prado composition, could settle, once and for all the controversy. The difference between a good musician, Machito, and a great musician like Perez Prado is obvious.

Another serious failure of the book is that Roberts virtually ignores Arsenio Rodriguez, the legendary composer, performer and bandleader he credits as being “the most important name in the development of the conjunto.” In the ‘40s, the sextets and septets that were popular in the ‘30s evolved into conjuntos. These were small orchestras formed with a guitar, two to four trumpets, a percussion team, bass, three singers who also played guiro, maracas and clave and a lead instrument. In the Conjunto Casino, for example, the lead was the piano. Rodriguez chose the tresillo instead of the piano, among other things, because nobody played the tres like Rodriguez, “El ciego maravilloso” or Marvelous Blindman.

An exceptional tresillo player, Rodriguez played in several sextets in Havana. Around 1940, he formed his own conjunto and soon, his group became a de facto musical school for many of the best musicians in Cuba. Some of his compositions, like “Bruca Manigua,” “No me llores,” “La vida es sueno,” continue to be standards in many Latin American bands. Rodriguez moved to New York in the ‘50s seeking a cure for his blindness and once there formed an extraordinary conjunto. A few years later he moved to Los Angeles, where he died in 1971. Unfortunately, Roberts writes only three short paragraphs to tell the story of Rodriguez, a veritable Cuban musical giant.

Roberts nonetheless writes with an understanding and a passion about the evolution and impact of Latin music in America. He patiently documents this process from the remotest and oddest to the most obvious, weaving throughout his book a refreshing erudition, showing readers that “cross-fertilization has been at the heart of the Latin experience in the United States for more than a hundred years.”